Wokcano Asian Restaurant & Lounge

Cuisine: This Asian eclectic maxi-restaurant has a sprawling space with a menu that’s part sushi bar and part Chinese eatery.

Hours: Lunch and dinner, Monday-Friday. Dinner only Saturday-Sunday.

Details: Full bar. Street parking. Reservations important.

Prices: Appetizers, $3-$18. Sushi, $5-$18. Entrees, $11-$25.

Cards: MC, V.

You really have to be duly impressed by Wokcano’s commitment to offering something for (almost) everyone. It’s the rare restaurant where you can dine on both hamachi with yuzu flavored soy sauce and honey walnut shrimp — both with a baked lobster and crab handroll, plus a double kung pao with both chicken and shrimp. The place is like two kitchens under one roof (and possibly more) for there’s also grilled salmon, grilled Chilean sea bass, Korean style short ribs and pad Thai noodles, too.

What’s more, it’s all served in one of the most stylishly eclectic spaces around.

Wokcano Long Beach is dark and wood-lined, a bit like sitting inside a cigar box with slat window treatments, low lighting, an impressive bar and curious brickwork against one wall. It’s very designerish; this is not a generic space, not even close. Like many of the occupants of The Promenade in Long Beach, it’s a space that’s easy to settle into and stay in for quite a while.

Some of the dishes are even as designerish as the setting. Take the spicy crabmeat tempura roll for instance. It’s a lovely bit of edible art; a long line of well crisped rolls with a line of sauce right down the middle, resting on a bed of wasabi at one end, and pickled ginger at the other. Then consider the Rainbow Roll, which lives up to its name as it’s a platter of many colors from the salmon, tuna, yellowtail, avocado and atop a California Roll.

It’s probably a good idea to kick off an evening at Wokcano with one of the many exotic cocktails, reminiscent of the fruity drinks they make at Trader Vic’s. They’re drinks that go down far faster than you want them to, which is one reason it’s good that the food at Wokcano emerges from the kitchen(s) and sushi bar at a reasonable pace. Order the edamame, and you already have a choice to make before it’s rushed to you table: a simple edamame with sea salt, or a more complex spicy edamame with garlic and soy? In either case, you’ll be squeezing beans out of their shell before you decide on what else to eat.

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My daughter, who’s rather mad for Brussels sprouts (we do live in a new world, when things like that can be said without irony or shame) insisted on the crispy sprouts with garlic. They were good, but a bit burnt. I went with the shishito peppers, which are always a fun game to play because you never know which ones will be spicy hot and which will be mild. (I’ve spoken to growers; no one can figure out the code.)

Before you even get to the sushi, the temptations are many. There are steamed chicken and shrimp wontons, fried or steamed chicken dumplings, crispy calamari (that could be crispier) and a snappy Peking duck wrap, a peppery hamachi collar. There’s even something called Monkey Brain, which is a tempura avocado stuffed with spicy tuna and crabmeat, topped with sweet eel sauce. Putting aside the grimness of the name, my biggest critique is that avocado shouldn’t be tempura fried — at least, not in my world. But the spicy tuna on crispy rice was a classic preparation of a classic dish, so all is forgiven.

And really, once you start ordering the assortment of Wokcano exotic rolls, the oddity of tempura avocado fades away and is replaced by the happiness of the aforementioned spicy crabmeat tempura roll. The oddest ingredient in that roll is the spiced mayo, but since Japanese cooking has adopted mayo as its own, I guess that’s OK.

Less OK are the dishes that used cream cheese like the Philadelphia Roll, Smoky Sunset Roll, Black Pearl Roll and Crunchy Roll. Call me a Sushi Luddite, but I just don’t get the presence of cream cheese in sushi rolls. It’s like chocolate covered fried chicken — which as it happens, is what they do at a new downtown fastfoodery called ChocoChicken. But I digress.

If you weary of sushi rolls or at a table with variant tastes, there’s spicy garlic shrimp, curry shrimp, spicy basil shrimp, sweet and sour pork, beef with broccoli, Mongolian beef, lemon chicken, orange chicken, some good thin Singapore-style noodles and garlic noodles that I’d probably like more if they weren’t tossed with Parmesan.

What the chefs do well at Wokcano, they do well. But I do wish that on some dishes they’d just leave well enough alone.